The Foundation Upon Which Science Rests:
The Correlation Between the Human Mind and
Physical Reality
W. Jim Neidhardt
Physics Department
New Jersey Institute of Technology
Newark, New Jersey 07102

From: JASA 32(December1980): 244-246.

When the scientist attempts to understand a group of natural phenomena, be begins with the assumption that these phenomena
obey certain laws which, being intelligible to our reason, can be
comprehended. This is
not, let us
hasten to note, a self-evident
postulate which leaves no room for qualifications. In effect, what
it does is
to reiterate the rationality of the physical world, to recognize that the structure of the material universe has something in
common with the laws that govern the behavior of the human mind.1

In this manner one of the pioneers of 20th century physics,
Louis de Broglie, describes how a scientist goes about doing
his work. The scientific enterprise is seen as a creative dialogue
between the human mind and physical reality (nature), a correlation existing between the two distinct entities. Two recent
statements by physicists of today emphasize that scientists in
their work are motivated by a faith that such a correlation exists.
In a recent article the distinguished particle physicist, Steven
Weinberg, stresses that our current understanding is that certain
entities called quantum
fields,
highly abstract mathematical
products of the human mind, are basic to forming a coherent
representation of current elementary-particle physics. To quote
Weinberg:

The laws of nature give a fundamental role to certain entities.
We are not really sure what they are, but at the present level of
understanding they seem to be the elementary quantum fields.
They are highly simple because they are governed by symmetries.
These are not objects with which we are familiar. In fact, our
ordinary notions of space and time, causation, composition, substance and so on really lose their meaning on that scale. But it is
just at that scale, at the level of the quantum fields, that we are
beginning to find a certain satisfying simplicity.2

In a similar vein, the fact that highly abstract mathematical
concepts are found to "mirror" physical reality is marvelled
at by Eugene Wigner, a Nobel prize winner in physics, who
states that "one is confronted again and again with an unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics while investigating the
physical world."3

Today mathematics, an imaginative product of the human
mind, plays a fundamental role in representing physical reality.
The discovery of anti-matter, specifically the positive electron
by Paul Dirac is a particularly good example of this as Nigel
Calder points out:

In inventing 'anti-matter' Dirac was guided by his mathematics.
He had imposed upon himself the very important task of reconciling two great new theories of physics, the quantum mechanics
of sub-atomic behavior, and Einstein's relativity. With self confidence even greater than Anderson's (the experimentalist who
discovered the positive electron) he interpreted a minus sign in
his equations as meaning the existence of negative matter rather
than negative energy. It implied an extraordinary and unlookedfor symmetry at the heart of the
microuniverse, such that for each
particle there was an antiparticle, its opposite in every respect4

It should be stressed that the mathematical patterns used in
representing physical reality become recognized in acts of discovery rooted in observation and experiment, not in flights of
a priori reasoning. Furthermore, it is an interesting fact that
many of these mathematical patterns were created by the human
mind for sheer intellectual pleasure prior to when they were
found to be useful in explaining the nature of physical reality.
This is a rather surprising fact and an explanation for it cannot
easily be found from within a purely scientific perspective.

In the act of discovery the human mind utilizes a store of
rational structures or patterns which it can use to formulate a
hypothesis about the nature of physical reality. Propositions
are then deduced from the hypothesis that may be compared
to physical reality in acts of observation and experiment. If the
results are positive the credibility of the hypothesis is enhanced;
if the results are negative, changes are made drawing again upon
the stockpile of rational patterns stored in the mind and new
deductions drawn from the modified hypothesis are tested
experimentally. By this cyclic pattern of hypothesis formulation
and testing against physical reality science proceeds. Today
in physics these hypotheses are highly complex and abstract
mathematical representations of reality; simple mechanical
or everyday experience analogies are no longer found to be
useful in describing the really basic building blocks of matter-energy. The formulation of such hypotheses requires great physical intuition and mathematical creativity (often partly gained
by serving an apprenticeship to creative members of the physics
community). Science has abandoned cruder representations
of physical reality couched in the language of the senses for
much more ambitious representations couched in the language
of that most abstract area of human reason, pure mathematics.
In the following extended quote the theologian Thomas F.
Torrance nicely summarizes the nature of modern science with
its emphasis on mathematics as a means of exploring a rational,
objective, external reality:

... In every science we presuppose that what we know is accessible to rational inquiry, that it is somehow inherently intelligible
or rational. If it were not there could be no knowledge, let alone
any science. Hence a primary operation that must be undertaken
in any science, e.g., in developing verification, is to probe into
the inner rationality of the object or field of knowledge, into its
inner logic . . . What the scientist does in any field is to seek to
achieve an orderly understanding of events in which he can group
them as a connected and intelligible whole and so be able to penetrate into their inner rationality. He does not invent that rationality
but discovers it, even though he must act with imagination and
insight in detecting and developing the right clues and act creatively in constructing forms of thought and knowledge through
which he can discern the basic rationality and let his thinking fall
under its directions as be offers even a descriptive account of the
events. Undoubtedly a two-way movement of thought is involved
in working out the way in which his account of the events is related
to the grounds upon which it is based, for it is the coherence in
the pattern of his thought that enables him to discern the systematic
connection in the nature of things and yet it is only as he reaches
that discernment that he is able to separate out the actual evidence
upon which his account of events must be allowed to rest. In so
far as he can reduce to consistent and rational expression the ways
in which his knowledge is related to the grounds upon which it
is based, he is convinced that he has come to grips with the inherent rationality of things and is convinced of the truth of his
constructions. Hence the crucial importance in many natural
sciences of achieving wherever possible mathematical representation of our understanding of things, for it is in that way that we
bring the objective rationality to view. Yet we may treat that
representation only as an explicatory model or a disclosure model
through which we interpretatively apprehend the reality that we
are investigating and not as a descriptive formula or as the equivalent of some ontic structure of the reality itself ... We are engaged
properly in scientific activity only when we pass beyond description and narration to explanation, in which we penetrate, clarify,
and explicate the inner intelligibility of what we investigate.5

A Theological Explanation

What has been testified to is the assertion that central to the
doing of science is the correlation between the subject of science,
the scientist's mind, and the object of science, natural phenomena. Why does such a correlation exist? As the Dutch theologian,
Abraham Kuyper, pointed out over seventy years ago, the JudaicChristian perspective provides an answer:

Figure
1.
The Scientific Enterprise -
Its dependency upon the trustworthiness of a supremely rational, imaginative, purposeful, all-caring, personal God who holds in being both man,
with his human reason, and nature thereby causing the two distinct entities
to be correlated.

Nomenclature:
GOD the LOGOS-The divine, creative word as set forth in the first chapter
of St. John's Gospel. The Logos means that within the presence of God
there is present a creativity which is personal, which orders the universe,
which awakes the response in man corresponding to his order, and lastly
which existed eternally but was manifest in the Jesus of history.

...
by our abstract thinking we constantly form conclusions, which
presently are seen to agree entirely with actual relations. In this
way object and subject stand over against one another as wholly
allied, and the more deeply our human consciousness penetrates
into the cosmos, the closer this alliance is seen to be, both as concerns the
substanceand morphology of the object, and the thoughts
that lie expressed in the relations of the object. And since the object does not produce the subject, nor the subject the object, the
power that binds the two organically together must of necessity
be sought outside of each. And however much we speculate and
ponder, no explanation can ever suggest itself to our sense, of the
all-sufficient ground for this admirable correspondence between
object and subject, on which the possibility and development of
science wholly rests, until at the hand of Holy Scripture we confess that the Author of the cosmos created man in the cosmos as
microcosmos after his image and likeness.

Thus understood,
science
presents itself to us as a necessary
and ever-continued impulse in the human mind to reflect within
itself the cosmos, plastically as to its elements, and to think it
through logically as to its relations, always with the understanding
that the human mind is capable of this by reason of its organic
affinity to its object.6

Thus Kuyper asserts that the Judaic-Christian tradition teaches
that science, a creative dialogue between reason and all reality,
is dependent upon the trustworthiness of a supremely rational,
imaginative, purposeful, all-caring, personal God. That nature
is not a chaos but a highly ordered structure, a cosmos, is a direct
consequence of the nature of God; that man has the ability to
create mental structures which are faithful representations of
physical reality is a direct consequence of man being made in
the creator-God's image. Hence human reason and nature must
be correlated as schematically shown in Figure 1. The fact that
mathematical patterns were created prior to a physical application being discovered is easily explained if it is recognized that
the mind that developed the pattern is made in the image of
the designer of the natural order.7

Furthermore, the creator-God's inherent rational and purposeful nature offers a plausible explanation for why highly
rational mathematical structures are so useful in the physical
sciences while in other fields in particular the human sciences,
purpose and teleology play vital roles. Some scientists of mechanistic persuasion might object to the latter comment. One example will show the fruitfulness of the concept of purpose in
the human sciences. Victor FrankI in his important book
The
Will to Meaning
more than adequately justifies the validity of psychology named logotherapy based upon the precept that person who has found purpose and meaning in his life is free
to shape his own character and remains capable of always resisting and bracing even the worst conditions.

Lastly, the all caring, loving nature of the creator-God is deeply
reflected in the human activity of science; scientific discoveries
were and are most often made by men and women deeply committed to their task, often sacrificing much in the way of time
and rejecting material benefits in order that their research efforts
bear fruit. To be truly creative in science you must love your
work. The knowledge of physical or mathematical structure
cannot be separated from a loving appreciation of their beauty
such intellectual acts are not only acts of understanding but
also acts of love.

Conclusion

We have shown that a theological
perspective derived
from
Holy Scriptures (in existence long before the birth of modern
science) provides
a satisfactory explanation for the strong faith
of the scientific community that human reason can successfully
guide the exploration of nature, the two distinct entities being
correlated. Furthermore, the most recent advances in modern science eloquently testify to the validity of this correlation.
Relativity theory with its utilization of a four-dimensional geometry
to represent physical reality is a striking illustration of this. As
Thomas F. Torrance has pointed out:

No
doubt four-dimensional geometries have chanced into science
through free postulatory thinking, but when it was found that they
could and did in fact apply to actual existence, it was realized that
they were not just ideal possibilities which the human mind happened to think
up,
but involved a far-reaching correlation between
abstract conceptual systems and physical processes that carried
us into an objective state of affairs beyond all our intuitive representations, Hence the dismantling by relativity theory of the old
cosmologies and the kind of objectivities bound up with them, has
brought to light a new and far profounder objectivity which is
invariant with respect to our subjectivities.8

Postscript

Some might deny the full validity of the theological argument
by invoking the scientific theory of evolution. They argue that
the subjective cognitive structures of the human mind coincide
to some extent with the objective structures of the real world,
because they have developed as an
adaptation
to the real world
which maximizes survival. From the point of view of a single
individual, a postulate about experience is a postulate
a priori is
a strict sense. However, from the point of view of evolution, the
same postulate is made
a posteriori;
it is based upon experience namely on the experience of our ancestors, which is preserved
and stored in the genetic information we have inherited from our
parents. In this manner it is argued man can "invent" statements
that later are found to explicate physical reality. But is the emergence of the human mind's ability to do this explicable in terms
of the survival advantage it confers on its possessors for the range of activities we have been considering? What is the survival value
to its author or its observers of a Beethoven trio, a Ming vase,
a poem of Dante, or an understanding of relativity?

The example of general relativity is striking. Human beings
have adapted to the flat, 3-dimensional space of Euclid seemingly separated from an absolute time. However Riemannian geometry, a non-Euclidian geometry of many dimensions, is found in
general relativity to faithfully represent space and time, no longer
considered separate but fused together as a space-time continium. Thus 4-dimensional Riemannian geometry which was developed by the human mind for no other purpose than to delight
in its intellectual beauty brings into being a new vision of physical
reality very different from the common sense 3-dimensional
world we thought we were adapted to. And this new vision of
reality accurately predicts physical behavior, i.e. the gravitational bending of light, that common sense notions never called
attention to.

Indeed considering the possible validity of evolutionary theory

... the structure of matter and of space and time was established
long before men appeared on this planet equipped with a brain
which seemed to be only the accidental product of natural selection
on chance mutations in a changing environment. But now we have
discovered that systems spun out by that brain, for no other purpose than our sheer delight with their beauty, correspond precisely to the intricate design of natural order which predated man
and his brain. That surely has led to the discovery that man is
amazingly like the designer of that natural order; how better to
describe this discovery than to assert that man is indeed made in
the image of God!9

1Taken from Arthur March and Ira M. Freeman,
The New World of Physics, Vintage Books, New York, 1963, p. 143.

2Steven Weinberg, "Is Science Simple?"
Taken from The Nature of the
Physical Universe, edited by Douglass Huff and Omer Prewett, John
Wiley & Sons, New York, 1979, p. 62.